Jasmine Marie: Artist’s Talk

JASMINE MARIE, currently exhibiting her work in the Ross Gallery, is a photographer, writer, performer, curator, and filmmaker whose personal work explores both the mundane and the fantastic of black life with a focus on southern black culture and spirituality. With a leaning towards speculative fiction and afrosurrealism, she utilizes video, text, and portraiture to explore how the mediums work together to tell stories of love and identity. Her work also explores the connection between queerness, black femme identity, and the role of community through the lens of heritage and space. She currently lives and works in Memphis.

Jasmine will talk about her work in a discussion with JANAY KELLEY, a literary and visual artist born and based in Memphis. Brought up in the land of river and blues, raised in the East with familial ties to Orange Mound, Kelley crafts prose, poetry, textiles, and film that reflect her internalization of the world around her. Her work explores themes such as womanhood, Black spirituality, and Southern landscapes with a personal touch. The artist once wrote, “My niggas live forever around here,” and the quote stands true in her art. Every project of Kelley’s is a passion project, for she loves her people as much as she loves her craft. It is her honor to display her subject matter not as unwavering models of Blackness, frozen in pain and suffering, but alive, full of story, and full of contradictions and humanness as they are off the screen.